But that great mercantile people, the Phoenicians, also left to the nations near their old home in Palestine, the same precious gift of an alphabet. Very old inscriptions in Hebrew, lately found, are seen to be written in almost the same alphabet as the Phoenician. Perhaps you are beginning to wonder how many peoples there are who owe their letters to that old sea-folk who were the traders, pirates, and buccaneers of the Mediterranean! There is the Hebrew, which people have called the alphabet of God, because the Holy Scriptures were written in it, and which was also used by magicians for their amulets and talismans; there is the Greek, in which the epics of Homer, the long poems of Hesiod, and the rhapsodies of Pindar were taken down; there is the Latin, in which all the wisdom of the ancients reached us; and there are all the differing alphabets, printed characters, and script handwritings of Europe and America! In fact, I could not tell you here, so numerous are they, the names of all the languages in Asia, Africa, Europe, and America, that were and are written in some alphabet, which traces its descent from the twenty-two Phoenician letters. The connection between Greek and Phoenician is much easier to believe than that Arabic, a sentence of which you see here represented, should be also a writing derived from the Phoenician. Arabic letters are used by so large a portion of the inhabitants of the earth that it stands second among the great national, or rather, the great religious alphabets of the world. Some of you know, I suppose, that Mohammed was a very wise and imaginative Arab of an important though poor tribe of Arabia Felix. He was a great poet and statesman; he had visions and called himself the Prophet of God. He wrote the Koran, which is used by an immense multitude of men as their only law-book and Bible. The dialect which he and his clan used became, through the spread of his doctrines, the standard, first for all Arabia, and then for all the enormous countries a hundred times larger than Arabia which his disciples and their followers won by force of arms. [Illustration: This Arabic sentence is a famous inscription upon the colonnade of one of the great mosques at Jerusalem. The mosque is known as the "Dome of the Rock," and it is thought to stand upon a portion of the site of the great Jewish Temple. This inscription is placed near the great southern door of the mosque. It is in one continuous line, however, instead of two as represented in this fac-simile. It reads from right to left, and is thus translated: "This dome was built by the servant of God, Abd [allah-el-Imam-al-Mamûn, E] mir of the Faithful, in the year seventy-two. May God be well pleased, and be satisfied with him. Amen."]